The media machine is doing what it does best: manufacturing moral panic over a photo op. Headlines scream about the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, breathlessly obsessing over Donald Trump bypassing the traditional Ground Zero ritual. Pious pundits clutch their pearls. They demand ritualistic grief, scripted solemnity, and a display of manufactured unity from political figures who treat sacred ground as a campaign backdrop.
It is a theatrical production built on bad faith.
For two and a half decades, the annual pilgrimage to Lower Manhattan has devolved into a bipartisan exercise in hypocrisy. Politicians use the reflecting pools as props, wearing grim expressions for the cameras before flying back to Washington to vote for trillion-dollar security apparatuses that shredded civil liberties under the banner of national defense.
Trump staying away is not an insult to the memory of the fallen. It is an indictment of the circus.
The Currency of Manufactured Grief
We live in an era where mourning must be televised to count. If a politician does not stand in front of a monument reading names from a laminated card, they are accused of treason. This is a profound misunderstanding of public memory.
True commemoration does not require network cameras or a line of aging dignitaries wearing identical black coats. It requires accountability—something Washington has aggressively avoided since 2001.
Consider the trajectory of the post-9/11 world. We traded an open society for the TSA theater, the Patriot Act, and two decades of catastrophic foreign entanglements in places that had nothing to do with the skyline of New York. Trillions of dollars vanished into the defense contractor black hole. Thousands of young Americans came home in flag-draped boxes or with shattered minds and bodies. Hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East paid the ultimate price for a retaliatory doctrine that lost its plot within the first five years.
Yet the press corps wants to lecture the public because a former president bypassed a politician-heavy staging area.
The Staged Performance Versus Reality
Imagine a scenario where every major political figure boycotts the televised grief-fest until the government declassifies every remaining page of intelligence related to the Saudi connections to the hijackers, or until veteran healthcare through the VA is fully funded without bureaucratic friction.
That would be real respect. Instead, we get the annual parade.
The media wants a simple narrative: attendance equals patriotism, absence equals betrayal. It is a binary designed for low-information consumers who prefer emotional manipulation over hard structural critiques. Trump’s absence disrupts the script. It forces a question nobody in the mainstream press wants to answer: What are we actually commemorating twenty-five years later? Are we remembering the dead, or are we worshiping the monument to state failure?
The victims of that day deserve better than being used as pawns in a daily news cycle designed to generate clicks and outrage. If skipping the ritualistic hand-wringing at Ground Zero means refusing to participate in a quarter-century of political theater, more power to him.
Stop demanding performances from politicians. Start demanding competence from a government that has spent twenty-five years exploiting a national tragedy to expand its own reach.
The cameras will pack up by noon. The politicians will fly home. The endless wars and domestic surveillance states will remain. Trump not being there changes none of that, but at least it saves us the lie.
